


Premium Loss

by aqhrodites



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Prompt Fic, Songfic, Stydia, Stydia Month, Stydia Week, Stydia Week 2, This is not really a song fic because it's based slightly off of a song, fic request, season 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-26
Updated: 2016-08-26
Packaged: 2018-08-10 19:34:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7858297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aqhrodites/pseuds/aqhrodites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <b>A oneshot prompt. Stydia + "Heaven" by Beyonce.</b>
</p><p>
  <i>A chance. To consume, corrode.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>A red string.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“The two people connected by the impalpable, fictitious red thread are destined lovers, regardless of place, time, or circumstances. This magical cord may stretch or tangle, but never break.”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Except—</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“The red string never strains. It may tangle and stretch, but never break, except—”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>A red string—tied—affixed—</i>
</p><p>
  <i>A red string hangs from each of the electric-wired patches forced onto Lydia’s temples as she’s strapped down into a beaten leather chair.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Premium Loss

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Stydia (Stiles/Lydia) + the song “Heaven” by Beyoncé  
> 

* * *

**###**

 

Clamorous.

Cataclysmic.

A vermilion red.

Chance.

To consume, corrode.

A red string.

_“The two people connected by the impalpable, fictitious red thread are destined lovers, regardless of place, time, or circumstances. This magical cord may stretch or tangle, but never break.”_

Except—

Stiles bangs on the locked metal door of the asylum. He calls, cries, for the young woman taken through them, it closing just before he could get through. Stiles pleads to the gods. It’s this one, silly door that’s a barricade—just one stupid, bothersome door!

He had fought so hard, just to be stopped here? His hands shake as they pound again against the door over and over and over and over. He wishes he was stronger. He screams to his lost love.

* * *

_When they first met was at a local elementary school. She had been a little redhead who’s favorite Disney princess was Ariel, and she had had just gotten a visit from The Tooth Fairy. It had been on the school playground. Stiles had a Batman bandage on his nose, reused from a scab on his elbow because why not._

_He had told her that she looked like an old lady with her missing teeth. She had pushed him down, stole his Band-Aid, and buried it in the sandbox._

_It wasn’t love at first sight._

* * *

_“The red string never strains. It may tangle and stretch, but never break, except—”_

_A red string—tied—affixed—_

A red string hangs from each of the patches connected to Lydia’s temples as she’s forced into a beaten leather chair.

Red is what she paints her nails, is the tint of her hair, the shade she colors her lips. It’s her favorite dress, strawberry jam, and the gems in her favourite pair of earrings. And it’s the stains dropped in the dry grass after a fresh kill, smeared on tree trunks by monsters. She’s seen too much of it, too much red spilled into the gutters and street drains. It’s dripped down her throat before and coated her shirt sleeves. Red has tainted her hands.

Everyone she knows has it on their hands.

Stiles is thrown from the door and it’s kidded in by a skeptical boy named Theo. Stiles follows the other down a passageway that leads under the town and in search of Lydia. And they find her—she’s hooked up to a dusty, aged electric contraption, and the deranged doctor-slash-previous insane asylum inmate, Valack, is at the controls.

Red is also what Stiles sees splattered across the floor, staining the walls, the brown chair, colors her hands still gripping the armrest.

_The lovers will never be truly apart—_

Red.

Ferocity. Brutality, barbarity.

_Except_ …

Red is what stains her eyes bloodshot as the electronic pitch coming through the wavelengths grow higher and higher still.

And she then screams.

Well of course she screams.

* * *

_At Beacon Hills High was when Stiles decided that he would finally make a move, that he would_ finally _get the girls of his dreams. The town was small so there was no why she could not remember him. He would wave and greet her—but then there was Jackson, her boyfriend, and then Stiles’ best friend, Scott’s own problems._

_Lydia was beautiful, smart, well known, and_ well-liked _._

_Lydia was the popular queen, the girlfriend of the lacrosse captain, straight-A student._

_And Stiles bumps into stool seats and when they share Chemistry class and fumbles balls on the lacrosse field. His heart would lodge in his chest and when she accepted his invitation to prom, he was through the roof._

_And then Jackson moved, Malia came and went. And the red string strengthened._

_Couples will always be brought together by the red string, whether it will take hours, weeks, or years._

* * *

Now it’s years later, the string is much shorter and stronger. But now it’s years later and Lydia is strapped to a chair with electric currents connected to her temples.

Valack’s objective was to hear the voice through the screams, to distinguish the cries in her head, as she was kidnapped to do, by changing the wavelengths of her brain. But Valack is a disturbed man, and is convinced that the dials be turned higher and higher still… There is a spark of electricity as the machines fizz and whirr and pop and gives up, and Lydia screams.

And there’s _red_.

_So much red_.

Her full lips pull back to call for him—the red string—because they couldn’t be separate for too long. And when Lydia screams, the whole world shatters, pauses, and fractures. It echoes off the narrow, metal walls below the town. Stiles runs faster.

_The red string will never break._

When Stiles skids into the room it’s painted a damp Venetian color, and the arrows to the machine’s gauges are already at zero. His sneaker toe slides in a small splatter of blood near the doorway. Behind him, Theo rushes in, momentarily losing his footing.

And Stiles rushes forward—of course he does—their red string. But he wasn’t fast enough. There’s blood streaming from Lydia’s ears, staining her gown from the trickle coming from her nose, crying from her eyes. Her head is heavy as he takes it in his hands, and he repeats her name over and over.

Valack lies dead on the floor, the entire top left of his head blown off from the sonic wave of Lydia’s banshee scream—when he turned the dials to its max and the screams split her skull in half.

Stiles rushes to her side immediately.

She gives a tiny, weak smile. “You came back…”

He flattens the strays at the top if her head. “Of course…of course…!” She’s trembling, he can feel, like she’s been pulled out of ice water.

She hums and sucks in a sharp breath. “It’s nice…”

His voice shakes. He tells how he was going to get her out of here, that she was going to be alright. But she shakes her head and repeats the same mantra as she had this entire this past week.

“If you stay here, you’re going to die.”

* * *

_Their first kiss had been rushed, unnecessary, and completely necessary. It had been in the dark, and Lydia watching Stiles’ terrified eyes. He was having trouble breathing, she hears, clearly. She tells him to focus, to listen to her voice and concentrate on her. He terrified; he was having a panic attack. His hands clench above the ground and he trembles._

_And then Lydia grabs hold of his face and presses her lips to his._

_It’s fast and impulsive. It’s forced—of course it’s forced._

_They pull apart slow and gentle, and the world settles up right to him._

_When he comes back down, Stiles asks why she had done that._

_She wasn’t entirely sure._

* * *

Bruising, red lips pulled back. Prom. His class ring. A reconciling. A hug, a high five, a kiss, a quarrel and a promise. The sarcasm and snide and laying across the dark indigo of his bed sheets. They had never said it, had never made it _official_ , but there’s no other reason why Stiles would run head first, potentially in the hands of a psycho.

It was caring, compassion, the red string.

It was in the hopes that he wouldn’t be holding her face in his hands like he is now, as the palms of his hands tap her cheeks.

“Lydia!” His hand slaps her cheek again. “C'mon Lydia…”

The cords hooked to her temple had been peeled off and her lips are paling. Theo ducks his head out into the hallway and alerts Stiles that they have to keep going, that they can carry Lydia with them. Because he knows—he doesn’t want to say that he knows.

Stiles blinks, hoping to rid the stinging in his eyes. She isn’t whispering anymore. He sniffs, pats her face again.

“Lydia… Lydia, wake up…!”

Her lips are paling too quickly. Her eyes are closed. Stiles’ hand hits the chair in frustration. He blinks back the moisture gathering in his eyes. They are going to need a hospital as soon as possible.

He wishes he could have some in time. He wishes heaven had been kinder.

“Lydia please wake up…”

Theo runs up and offers to carry her out. Her head lolls, support and control lost.

* * *

_Three days prior to this disastrous event, he had met Lydia at the library. She had been wearing her favourite red dress, the one with the small white flowers. She had sent a group text for a ride; Stiles was the one to answer first._

_The forecast had said 80 percent chance of rain. That 80 percent prevailed._

_It had been out in the pouring rain under Stiles’ large blue umbrella and Lydia half-drenched from the head down. She had opened her mouth to speak but shut them, pressing them in a strained straight line instead._

_Stiles raised a brow._

_Lydia dropped her head instead, rubbing her wet forehead into the middle of his clean blue button-down, and let out a frustrated groan. His body rumbled as he chuckled. He pressed down the frayed strands of her damp hair._

* * *

“Stiles?”

He looks up, appearing startled. He clears his throat. “Yes?”

“I said,” the woman across from him repeated, “how long has it been?”

_Oh._ “Almost a year.” He turns a single red-gem earring in his hands.

He remembers it like a dazed dream. Of rushing Lydia through the doors of Beacon Hills Hospital, her temperature dropping, the scrambling of the nurses and trying to follow along beside the gurney. He remembers when one of the nurses, a tall man with green eyes, emerged with a lowered gaze.

“We were supposed to graduate together. …And maybe then I’d…” Stiles can’t finish his sentence.

There’s a photo album of pictures printed from Facebook and Instagram. There’s a marker in it at the beginning of high school. It stops with a group picture.

She had been his first crush, Stiles tells, and though she wasn’t his first girlfriend, she was definitely the one he loved. Probably the only one. Even Scott had sighed and mumbled “it’s about time” when the two got together.

Stiles had had plans: after undergraduate school, he was going to propose. He knew he wouldn’t have the money then but it was at least worth a shot. There wasn’t much doubt that she would say _“no_. _”_

He laughs aloud at this. It was a silly, immature thought.

Stiles remembers the dilemma of knowing that Lydia’s parents will have to know, and that there will be one less seat at graduation that year. She was going to turn nineteen. She almost made it. She could have made it.

Stiles sits with his chin to his chest, the earring still moving between his hands. Vaguely, a memory of his father during his mother’s funeral passes through Stiles’ mind.

_“She was a good person and always tried to help those she cared about._  
_She was an angel,_  
_And heaven just couldn’t wait for her,_  
_And now she’s gone home.”_

**Author's Note:**

> Please **comment** and leave kudos if you like it.
> 
> This is also posted on [tumblr](http://aqhrodites.tumblr.com/).


End file.
